Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday July 18, 2011 @04:43PM
from the more-new-ideas-please dept.

A story at Wired charts the course of Chain World, a video game designed by Jason Rohrer to be different from any game that came before it. Quoting:
"It would exist on [a USB flash drive] and nowhere else. According to a set of rules defined by Rohrer, only one person on earth could play the game at a time. The player would modify the game’s environment as they moved through it. Then, after the player died in the game, they would pass the memory stick to the next person, who would play in the digital terrain altered by their predecessor—and on and on for years, decades, generations, epochs. In Rohrer’s mind, his game would share many qualities with religion—a holy ark, a set of commandments, a sense of secrecy and mortality and mystical anticipation. This was the idea, anyway, before things started to get weird."

It's impressive that a first post could get to the real heart of the topic so quickly and so succintly. This is indeed a story about the widely varying costs of USB memory sticks, and obviously nothing to do with either games or religion, as that would just be boring.

That is why I used to write cheat programs on my C64, most were easy and fun to figure out, only one that was a pain was Bard Tale II, they exor'ed everything with a different number. Those were the fun days to write cheat programs.

Yes, whats exactly preventing[1] people to copy the game to, say, other 10 USBs? In fact I think this is the interesting bit of the game: A chain reacion.. houndreds of thousands of different iterations and lives. And in the end just mix EVERYTHING and you have your LOC sized virtual world and mdash turns out to be a Zinga sockpuppet freeloading on crowdsourcing for the new gaming "blockbuster", bonus points for viral... YAY marketing!

You have infinite lives in nethack. Your character may die, but you just create a new one and use what you learned to do better. The goal is to use that learning to do better every time. In a game that can only ever be played once, there is no such learning. You do some things, and then never speak of or apply them again. What's the point?

The entire thing about this has basically nothing to do with the game. It's Minecraft with some custom scripts; it says so in the article. It's the events surrounding it that make this completely fascinating.

By taking that stand, you're basically saying his "art" is above criticism. Which cannot be true. I could poop on a USB stick and claim that it's a game about religion, but that doesn't mean it's art or pushing the limits of what it means to be a game. It's really just a filthy USB stick.

I can't even tell what this "game" has to do with religion. At it's most basic, Religion is a shared set of beliefs that propagates in some way. This is an ITEM with some rules attached. It has value because it is the

It's both, of course. You want to play a game that frees you from the boring reality. For example, you can be a wizard or a knight in various RPGs; you can be a mercenary or a cyborg or some other Savior of Humankind in many FPSes. On the other hand, you don't want to stray too far from the familiar world. For example, you can't play a game where you are an elementary particle, obeying laws of quantum mechanics of some parallel Universe. The playe

Imagine an FPS where you start the game first time, walk into an ambush, take a single bullet, and the game is over, with no chance of replay. WTF? Many FPSes require many replays of certain boss battles until you figure out what the winning strategy is (or simply get lucky.) Learning is the key to everything; we learn IRL and we learn in games. Playing this "game" wastes all the learning that you have done in there.

You appear in a vast land, overlooked by a prominent Lord Juan statue and completely paved over with dead bodies to a great depth. The stench overcomes you. You are dead. Please transfer this thumb drive to the next player.

You appear in a vast sunlit land, overlooked by a prominent Lord Juan statue wearing sunglasses and completely paved over with dead bodies to a great depth. The stench overcomes you. You are dead. Please transfer this thumb drive to the next player.

You appear in a vast sunlit land, overlooked by a prominent Lord Juan statue wearing sunglasses and completely paved over with dead bodies to a great depth, a single "pine fresh" car deodorizer lies pitifully on the human carpet. The stench overcomes you. You are dead. Please transfer this thumb drive to the next player.

You appear in a vast land, overlooked by a prominent golden Lord Juan statue and completely paved over with dead bodies to a great depth. One of the bodies near you appears to have been sexually molested.You see a lone vulture in the sky. The stench overcomes you. You are dead. Please transfer this thumb drive to the next player.

You appear in a vast land, overlooked by a prominent golden Lord Juan statue in the goat.se position and completely paved over with dead bodies to a great depth. You see a lone vulture in the sky. The stench overcomes you. You are dead. Please transfer this thumb drive to the next player.

You will not be able to plug this into anything in 3100 AD. All electronic devices will be from Apple with no external interfaces. You'll try and convince Apple to load the thumb drive into the App Store, a request which Steve Jobs XIX will absolutely refuse, but will offer to allow you to install iChainWorld instead for a fee.

We tried to do something like this at work: one person starts a lego model, the next person is supposed to take it on etc etc. Problem is one person gets busy and forgets and then it dies after 2-3 people for months on end and then everyone loses interest.

I think you miss the point. This was one guy entering a game contest and/or doing performance art. If you do that, well, I guess that would be annoying to the guy, but he still won the contest and saw his concept start. If you want to just be an ass, it would be easier just to erase the stick or throw it away.

It doesn't matter. This would basically represent a schism in the religion. As long as the original USB disk continues to be passed around, it would march onward as the "original" religion with its own narrative, and the copied form would exist as a separate "religion" with its alternate narrative. Much as various sects of Christianity all derived from a singular genesis.

And then the devotees of the original disk would shout, "SPLITTERS!!" at the copy faction.

It doesn't matter. This would basically represent a schism in the religion. As long as the original USB disk continues to be passed around, it would march onward as the "original" religion with its own narrative, and the copied form would exist as a separate "religion" with its alternate narrative. Much as various sects of Christianity all derived from a singular genesis.

And then the devotees of the original disk would shout, "SPLITTERS!!" at the copy faction.

Except it's not worth copying. The game itself is Minecraft. The only thing interesting about it is that you can only play it once, then have to hand it on. You can kind of look at the work of other people, which would be cool, I guess. But it's still just Minecraft.

Chain World, Rohrer explained, was a mod, a customized version of Minecraft and a set of scripts that govern how it’s played. And here was the cool part: It all lived on a single USB memory stick. [...] A week after the challenge, Ji posted an eBay auction for the memory stick. “This charity auction is for the third player slot for Chain World,” [...] The winner was an anonymous entity calling itself Positional Super Ko, a reference to a rule in the board game Go. For the right to play a used videogame exactly once, Positional Super Ko agreed to pay $3,300.

So basically he automated what the minecraft community has been doing already and people went full-on moron.

Chain World, Rohrer explained, was a mod, a customized version of Minecraft and a set of scripts that govern how it’s played. And here was the cool part: It all lived on a single USB memory stick. [...] A week after the challenge, Ji posted an eBay auction for the memory stick. “This charity auction is for the third player slot for Chain World,” [...] The winner was an anonymous entity calling itself Positional Super Ko, a reference to a rule in the board game Go. For the right to play a used videogame exactly once, Positional Super Ko agreed to pay $3,300.

So basically he automated what the minecraft community has been doing already and people went full-on moron.

Yes, he simulated a religious movement. Quite brilliantly, I think. Just goes to show, only an atheist can start a proper religion.

And like most ideas for a new religion, it's going to flop in the real world. For every Jesus and Joseph Smith, there are thousands of would-be prophets who end up either ranting alone a street corner, sitting in a mental institution, or burning on a big fucking pile of wood.

Rohrer's religion is going to end up sitting in a desk drawer somewhere, in possession of some random programmer who's "going to get around to it someday." Or maybe it will be erased by said random programmer's teenage son, who needs a

Yeah, it's as if a bunch of fucking hipsters found an old coin-op and began marvelling at the idea of leaving messages for future generations in the form of high scores attached to mysterious three-letter pseudonyms.

You didn't have to read the article, or even the entire summary. The first four words ("A story at Wired") tell you in no uncertain terms that it's going to be a story of, by, and for pretentious twits.

Anyone else remember "Obi" or "Obii" from perhaps the Seventies? The idea was something like a note in a bottle, with an expectation of return. This sounds like a game-ified version of the Obi. Since IIRC the Obi was about the shape and size of an egg, the form factors aren't all that incompatible.

I don't really see the draw here. If nothing else, ONLY ONE person gets to see your awesome high score at a time (the current player). Since a huge part of gaming is to best others' scores and have "everyone" know you're the champ, how smug are you gonna feel knowing that only one person at a time is ever gonna know what a l33t g4m3r you are?

I lived on the West Coast, so I guess that's why I had access to them. It would have been my parents buying it, not me. Apparently it flopped because they discovered that the "kindness of strangers" is a myth? People were probably tossing them in the garbage. Can you imagine the reaction of a New Yorker to one of those?

The original vision, according to the article, isn't that players realize any particular singular accomplishment. The idea is that over many players, the world becomes changed in ways that are meant to intrigue the next player. For example, I could start building a pyramid but die after just setting up the base, then the next player will see it and go "Oh cool, someone put a lot of effort into making this thing" and they might finish the pyramid or build something else on top of it, or just ignore it comple

I remember Passages. You start on the left side of the screen, move towards the right, then die. You get double the score if you choose to have a partner, but your score is irrelevant. That had a glimmer of meaning -- a brief comment on mortality. It had the weight of a typical New Yorker cartoon.

Chain World, from the article, is simply stupid. Religious mysticism is stupidity and confusion. Deliberately cultivating mysticism is deliberately cultivating stupidity and confusion. The entire set-up is intended to subtract meaning, not add it. It's entirely appropriate, though it isn't pointed out, that they use a flash drive for Chain World. Flash drives wear out.

The whole thing sounds like Rohrer forgot about the competition until the day before, then spent an hour throwing together a Minecraft mod, and spent the drive there trying to think up a speech.

Isn't this the guy who made that game where you play ball with someone, and doing so gives you the ability to "reach for the stars" but you eventually realize you have to abandon your buddy in order to get a high score? I think he basically stumbled into making an interesting game once, and has now convinced himself that he's more talented than he is. A lot of artists have that problem. See: George Lucas.

Nonsense, it has all the depth of dorm-room philosophy. It's that brilliant idea that you come up with at a party while you're stoned, leaning on your friend telling him how you've just come up with something that's "Going to change the fucking WORLD, man!" It's that plan that just sounds GREAT when it's presented by that charismatic marketing guy in the meeting. It's that profound idea that's the hit of the coffee shop when you tell your drum circle buddies about it. It's the dream that keeps you up at nig

I'm an atheist, but I've studied religious texts and met religious thinkers, and encountered many that I found intelligent, insightful, and wise; it seemed to me that much of what they refer to as religion or spirituality were alternate ways of describing material reality. Importantly, they were trying to understand the world around them.

Mysticism is not about understanding the world. It's a matter of fetishizing a lack of understanding. An

Congratulations, you are player 6,534,862,514.
You can expect to receive the thumb-drive for play some time shortly before this universes energy death. What, no PCs? Huh, no human race? The earth is a cinder and the sun is cold dead lump? Bummer dude.

Jason Rohrer is known as much for his eccentric lifestyle as for the brilliant, unusual games he designs.

Doesn't seem so bad.

He lives mostly off the grid in the desert town of Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Admirable and practical.

He doesn’t own a car

No big deal, better for his health and the environment.

or believe in vaccination.

Ding ding ding ding ding, we have ourselves a Grade-A dumbass!

I mean sure, vaccination has only pretty much wiped out smallpox, polio, and a few other diseases, but the scary stuff in the needle is made in a factory and designed by scientists! Surely Mother Earth will provide for us!

I honestly hope his children never get really, truly ill, because he'll have a very hard lesson to learn.. I have the feeling he'

If "enhanced sanitary conditions" were the reason for these to be erased (from the entire world in the case of smallpox, let's not forget that) then AIDS would be a minor problem nowadays with its harder infection mechanism (contact with body fluids of an infected person) and diseases like malaria would have been eradicated as well (especially with the efforts involved in kill

Players will play the game the way they want to, not the way you intended them to.

That's just plain elementary to all game design (or even anything interactive... remember that awful dungeonmaster who freaked out when you didn't play his campaign "the way you were supposed to"?).It honestly makes me a bit sad that he took a definitive open-ended sandbox game, and turned it into a bogged down experience where you are arbitrarily expected to do only what the dev (or should I say modder) wants.

As with all the best examples, it is impossible to tell definitively whether that is a brilliant troll, or you're just fucking stupid. I think you get the benefit of the doubt, as it's difficult to post to slashdot with just a crayon and a piece of paper.

As several people point out below, you pass it on when your game character dies, not the player IRL. And, I know, I shouldn't be feeding trolls, but this was a classic.